More on Occupy Oakland, etc.

So, interestingly, I may have been wrong about Fox News' reactions to Occupy Oakland. Rather than jump on the image of the burning American Flag, they actually played some of the footage showing the occupiers being attacked by the police; true, they also showed the aftermath of vandalism and interviewed the mayor (a "liberal" mayor--even a liberal is against them--they must have messed up) and then one person on the street who says, " "What they doin don't even make sense. Go home"  I don't think its a coincidence that they chose one black woman's reactions to the events; I think, and this is a cynical take on this, that Fox thinks that if a liberal mayor and a black woman on the street thinks the movement is useless, that they are appealing to audiences that may be put off by the 'whiteness' of Fox--liberals and minorities. Maybe this is stretching it a bit--but they did have to select whose reaction to the events they were going to show. At the very least, we can point out that they did NOT get any perspectives of the protesters or sympathizers. 

The thing I want to point out about this video is that rather than get up in arms about the movement's burning of the American Flag, the rhetoric Bill uses is that the movement is "finished" and "done," that they "blew it," and, even more surprising (to me) calling occupy wall street a brand.  we can see here Bills' opponent talking about how the powerful thing about occupy wall street is that the message (the 'claim' in Fitzgerald's language) has made it all the way to the President; in a way, even if the individual occupations have disintegrated, it is clear that the movement has made the 1% visible--and this is half (or maybe more) the battle.

So this is why they don't go after the anti-American sentiment (although Bill mentions it once) to forward their argument--or at least why they do not have to-- and instead decide to encourage the reification of Occupy into a brand--a brand that the market has declared obsolete. Occupy, according to Bill O'Reilley and co. is now an off-brand, hanging tattered on a clearance rack.